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This post covers another useful improvement in VS 2010 - HTML/ASP.NET/JavaScript snippet support. Snippets allow you to be more productive within source view by allowing you to create chunks of code and markup that you can quickly apply and use in your application with a minimum of character typing.

Visual Studio has supported the concept of "snippets" for VB and C# in previous releases - but not for HTML, ASP.NET markup and JavaScript. With VS 2010 we now support snippets for these content types as well.

.NET 4 includes a new version of the CLR, and a new .NET 4 specific machine.config file (which is installed side-by-side with the one used by .NET 2, .NET 3 and .NET 3.5).

The new .NET 4 machine.config file now automatically registers all of the ASP.NET tag sections, handlers and modules that we've added over the years, including the functionality for:

.ASP.NET AJAX .ASP.NET Dynamic Data .ASP.NET Routing (which can now be used for both ASP.NET WebForms and ASP.NET MVC) .ASP.NET Chart Control (which now ships built-into ASP.NET V4) What this means is that when you create a new "Empty ASP.NET application" project in VS 2010, you'll find that the new default application-level web.config file is now clean and simple:

Designing new functionality on existing applications can be daunting. There are always differences between the original design and the current implementation.

The new Architecture tools within Visual Studio Team System 2010 help you understand the application you have, design new functionality you need, and validate that your design and your implementation do not deviate.

In Visual Studio 2010, we've made several enhancements to our two most popular languages, Visual Basic and C#, to give programmers all the tools they need to build great software no matter which language they prefer.

The Visual Basic team focused on adding productivity features to the language so developers can get more done in fewer lines of code. The most common customer request for Visual Basic is to remove the underscore ("_") character when breaking a code statement across multiple lines in most cases. Visual Basic 10 introduces implicit line continuation, which removes the need for the underscore character in most cases.

When you first run VS 2010 it prompts you to select an IDE profile to use. The profile you select will configure how tool windows are displayed/docked in the IDE by default and set the default keyboard shortcuts. You can then customize any of these settings by using the Tools->Options menu within the IDE and then override/change them. You can also later reset your profile and pick a different one by choosing the Tools->Import and Export Settings menu command.

VS 2010 and .NET 4 are the next major releases of our developer tools and framework. Together they contain a ton of new functionality and improvements that I think you'll really like, and which make building applications of all types easier, faster and better. The improvements range from nice small tweaks to major, major enhancements - and can be found across the .NET Framework, the languages, and the IDE.

Many exciting changes for ASP.NET are coming in the .NET Framework version 4. This document gives an overview of many of the new features that are included in the Beta 2 release of the .NET Framework 4 and of Visual Studio 2010.

This is a big deal. This isn't ".NET 3.6" - there are a lot of improvements of .NET 4, and it's not just "pile on a bunch of features so you get overwhelmed." I've been working with and talking to many of the teams involved and even though it's a cheesy thing to say, this is a really customer-focused release.

There's a lot of stuff that's new and added in .NET 4, but not in that "overwhelming-I-need-to-relearn-everything" way. More in that, "oh, this is way easier/simpler now" way. Like, moving data around with ADO.NET DataServices is easy, binding with client templates is easy, there's F# if you need it, the "dynamic" keyword if you need it, Silverlight's already installed, oh, and the parallel stuff will freak you out, but in a good way.

As you probably know, Visual Studio 2010 was announced earlier this week and it contains a lot of cool features and project templates for SharePoint developers. Below is a short overview for some of the SharePoint development related features and project templates.

In case there is an exception anywhere in the SharePoint 2010 project (most common place an exception would happen is during deployment of your SharePoint project, custom deployment configuration or custom deployment steps), there's a registry key EnableDiagnostics available for you to use.

The following steps show how to install SharePoint 2010 on VMware workstation 7.0. Host computer used during the preparation of this walk-through was a Vista (32-bit) machine and guest machine used was VMware workstation 7.0 with Windows Server 2008 Service Pack 2 (64-bit).

If you don't see content query web part listed in the web parts list, this is because you have not enabled "Search Server Web Parts" feature in site collection features. Enable this feature and content query web part will show in the list of web parts.